I can’t possibly understand everything: takes on a heavily limiting belief

Let’s tackle the first obvious objections right away: I can’t possibly understand everything is possibly a true statement, and the wider the area encompassed by the definition of everything you deal with, the higher the probability that it will, indeed, be true.

Scope

Here, however, I’d like specifically not to include into everything things like the whole of science, philosophy, cooking and whatever else you might cherish.

Specifically, the scope here is about:

• the general process of building software in an organization
• that organisation’s purpose (aka what it does)
• the internal organisation of said organisation.

Even more specifically, I’d like this to be about your organisation¹.

However, once you are done reading, try to play with the idea that you might be able to grasp many more things than you believe is possible, and see what effect it has on you.

Problems

One of the problems of the statement you can’t understand everything is as follows: Ok, I can’t know everything, but I can know some things, so where exactly is the limit?

I’d wager that it is impossible to define a clear limit on how much knowledge and understanding you can get into your head, because this depends on a ton of factors, one of them being the quality of the explanations with which you feed knowledge into it.²

This is just to say that even if there is a limit, you’ll never know how far you are from it. Because of this, you can safely continue under the assumption I can always understand more, and you’ll worry with the limit if and when you stumble on it.

The Limiting Part

Now, what about the problems that are introduced by insisting that there is a limit on what you can know?

This leads to members of an organisation to think there is someone else who grasps things I cannot about other areas in our business. This someone else might well share that belief, and be convinced that parts of the business are entirely beyond his understanding, too.

It might well be true today, but the interesting thing about knowledge is that it can grow in unpredictable ways: tomorrow, you or any of your colleagues might come up with a new way of reasoning about your activity which could happen to be really easy to explain and teach to others.

If people somehow learn not to think about things they feel they can’t grasp, new reasoning modes are very unlikely to occur, and this is definitely not a good situation for any kind of organisation, but is even worse in software based businesses.

Lastly, if you accept the idea of firm knowledge limits, I’d argue that they will materialise in very concrete forms and in the most obvious possible spots. This would be along existing structural and hierarchical boundaries, and it will tend to re-inforce the effects of Conway’s law as well as worsen organisational fragmentation.

Positive Reformulations

So, how do we deal with the fact that there might be limits to our understanding without bringing about negative self-realising prophecies?

For any individual, we can simply formulate it positively:

I don’t know how much I can learn, so I just keep going until I find out.

And, to drive home the point at an organisational level:

We should strive to make what we do understandable, at all levels, by as many individuals as possible. Because for as long as they can increase their understanding, the whole organisation will benefit.

Conclusion

To end this post: I’m not saying you should endeavor to understand everything if you have no interest in it³.

Nevertheless, if you sit in any kind of a leadership position in this business we call knowledge work, you should make darn sure that trying to increase your understanding about what we do is very encouraged, and that everyone knows about it. Even if a tiny minorty of an organisation actually does this, the benefits can be tremendous.

On the contrary, if everyone has integrated that there are subjects and specialties that are really off limits, even if someone has the capacity to build a complete mental picture of what your business does, chances are they won’t do so, and you won’t even know what you’re missing.

Thanks for reading, and have a pleasant day!